Even dedicated Republicans criticized President Donald Trump for baselessly crying “fraud” and accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election for Joe Biden on Tuesday.
As millions of absentee and mail-in votes were still to be counted in battleground states, Trump told supporters: “We want all voting to stop, we don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. It’s a very sad moment. We will win this, and as far as I’m concerned we already have won.” He even threatened to take the matter to the Supreme Court.
Former GOP New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said in critical remarks on ABC News that he was speaking as a former U.S. attorney.
“There’s just no basis to make that argument tonight,” he told political analyst George Stephanopoulos. “There just isn’t. All these votes have to be counted that are in now. ... I disagree with what he did tonight. ... There comes a point where you have to let the process play itself out before you judge it to have been flawed.”
Christie, who recently took shots at the president’s dismissal of mask-wearing after the ex-governor contracted the coronavirus, had more to say about Trump’s fraud claim on Tuesday.
“It’s a bad strategic decision,” Christie added. “It’s bad political decision.”
Ultraconservative former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (R) also bashed the man he often supports.
“I was very distressed by what I heard the president say,” Santorum said on CNN.
Acknowledging that Trump was prone to bluster, Santorum still scolded the incumbent. “Using the word fraud, that there is fraud being committed by people counting votes is wrong,” he said.
“In Pennsylvania, what’s happening is they’re counting the absentee and mail-in voting right now and some counties have stopped counting. Why have they stopped counting? Because it’s 2:48 in the morning. That’s why they’ve stopped counting, because people get tired. When they’re tired they make mistakes. ... They’re not stopping counting because they’re trying to fix anything or create some kind of fraud.”
Even a Fox News anchor took the president to task.
“This is an extremely flammable situation and the president just threw a match on it,” Chris Wallace said, per The New York Times.
Of Trump’s premature declaration of victory in undecided battleground states, Wallace (who is reportedly a Democrat and is one of the channel’s more moderate personalities) said: “He hasn’t won these states. Nobody is saying he’s won the states. The states haven’t said that he’s won.”